A couple of months ago I was out and about wit my fellow Microsoft colleagues at Weston Manor, in Oxford, for a ‘Cloud’ related conference. The content for the event, along with the videos I made, are now up on the architects portal.
Click here to visit the site and see the videos
I’ve put a little over 1,000 miles on my car with a drive up to Edinburgh and Leeds to deliver a session on Azure as part of the fowa tour 2009. The tour is going really well, lots of interesting folk at the events, lots of discussion around cloud computing, web design, and some really great speakers. I was pleasantly surprised to find out how many people were already using .NET, and there is a lot of interest in Azure, ASP.NET and more recently, BizSpark.
One of the fun things about these events is the way you can get real time feedback on the event and sessions, and a handle on what people are thinking about, through Twitter, as most attendees seemed to Tweet the entire time :-) Its always nice to get good feedback on what we are doing (I’m @ScroffTheBad):
Edinburgh and Leeds are still lovely cities to hold these events:
I’ve posted my tour photos on Flickr, but my favourite has to be this:
Don’t miss out on the final two tour dates in Cambridge and Bristol next week.
I have been asked by the powers that be to update my biography, and supply some new photos. As I always loose this sort of thing, I thought I’d post it here, where I can find it again, and point people to it:
Ever since David programmed his first ‘10 ? “hello world” : goto 10‘ program on a PET computer in the late 70s he has been hooked, and has worked with computers ever since. During his career, David has secured a Distinction in Computing Science, worked as a freelance computer journalist, visiting lecturer, director of a software company, as well has having designed and developed a wide range of software, from warehouse to finance systems.
For the last 15 years David has worked at Microsoft, firstly in its fledgling consultant service section, then in EMEA as a technical evangelist (yes that was the official job title). Since Microsoft’s launch of .NET, he has been focused on the .NET platform, helping design and build a wide range of systems, from smart clients to web applications, and more recently, cloud computing with the Windows Azure platform. He also runs and delivers regular technical briefings around the Microsoft platform, and has been involved with Teched Europe for the last 11 years.
On Friday night I attended my first ever London MiniBar meeting. It was great fun, I met lots of interesting folk, and had some very great pro and anti Microsoft conversations after my presentation about Windows Azure.
The website sums up the event nicely:
Your Monthly Face To Face. You think about creating the next Last.fm, flickr, or Web 2.0 start up? You think London lacks opportunities to meet up and discuss those ideas? Then come to MiniBar. MiniBar is a social evening in Shoreditch, which offers people a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, web applications, start ups, social networking and general Web 2.0 mayhem & fandango.
I urge you join and come along to a future meeting . . .
Although I think Family Guy is great, I don’t get this little dig they had the Zune – I love my Zune!
I had great fun last night at the TechCrunchTalk and ChristmasCrunch Party in London. It’s always interesting to spend time with start ups, and the line up of speakers and panel discussions and beer was a winning combination. I’m now trying out Qype, and have a revised view of PR and lawyers :-)
And of course, I should mention that Microsoft sponsored the event through BizSpark - if you are a technology start up, and not building on Microsoft software, then check out BizSpark - we could change your view our platform:
BizSpark is uniquely designed to accelerate your success by providing fast, affordable access to current, full-featured Microsoft tools and technologies, plus production licensing for hosted solutions. For support, BizSpark unites a global community of technology and entrepreneurial experts who can guide you through the hurdles of growing a new business.
Whilst reading Steve Krug’s excellent “Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” I came across a wonderfully simple and evocative web site – CSS Zen Garden.
I’m a developer and engineer, not a designer, so elegant, well designed web sites always impress me, because I know I could never achieve such beauty. This site has a selection of superb CSS style sheets that you can click on to dramatically change the look and fee of the site, but one only using CSS – the HTML stays the same. If you doubt (or just plain don’t understand, like me) the power of CSS, spend a few minutes on the site.
I had a chat with Tara Hellier about the work we are doing with Fasttrack – if you want to know more about our fastrack reviews, check it out.
Jason Zander gives a great keynote and shows off Visual Studio 2010, and what looks like a very large touch screen demo with Windows 7 :-)
He also give my PDC track a plug - thanks Jason!
I’m one of the UK DE ISV team involved in delivering a new series of technology briefings entitled “Fasttrack – The Magic of Software”, targeted at ISVs, to let them see some of the latest and most exciting software coming out of Microsoft, and explore how that software could be used in their own applications.
These briefings will run monthly, and the content will change and evolve over the year to reflect both emerging software and technology trends, and input from both ISVs and the ISV team. The briefings will include some or more of the following technologies :
- Business Intelligence and data mining and how to get the most out of your data with SQL Server
- Examining the trade-offs for WPF and Silverlight and ASP.NET in designing UIs
- How cloud and utility computing changes the on/off premise options
- Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 integration opportunities
- How mobile solutions can extend the reach of your solutions
- What the next version of the .NET framework and Visual Studio have in store
- and more . . . .
The day will consist of lots of demos and lively discussion, with the aim of exploring how these technologies can be used within ISVs own applications. The sessions audience size will be small, typically less than 30, to keep the flow of conversation going. These sessions are suitable for Technical Decision Makers, Application Architects, and Senior Developers.
The two events are now live – click below for the appropriate event – and be sure to book early.
24th November 2008 – London
11th December 2008 – Reading
I did the quiz at BBC NEWS | Magazine | Midweek quiz: Old computers and got 7 out of 10 (with no cheating or looking up anything) – what score did you get??
Microsoft were one of the sponsors of last weekend’s BarCampLondon5, so I spend an very enjoyable time talking to a whole host of technical folk about all sorts of things, not all of them technical, but all very interesting :-)
If you have never been to a BarCamp before, which I hadn’t, check out the Wikipedia for some background information. BarCamp is really characterised as “All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via public web channels including (but not limited to) blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wiki-ing”
As you can see from the photos, the participation grows organically, and can be very ad-hoc, and the sessions range from quite slick presentation to very informal discussions.
If I had to pick a favourite session, which is hard, I think it would be the one on web design by Andy Budd, although I was impressed with moo and their new API.
I was devastated when I heard that one of my friends and colleagues, Patrick Tisseghem, had passed away recently.
Patrick Tisseghem, the beloved husband of Linda Godau and the loving father of their daughters Anahi and Laura, was born in Halle, Belgium on 17 October 1968 and passed away in Goteborg, Sweden on 3 September 2008.
I had worked with, and been taught by, Patrick on a number of projects and ventures over the years, one of the most recent being TechEd EMEA last year, where I took this photo of Patrick.
You will be missed.
I spent the weekend at Mashed 2008, a "hack day". Its sponsored by the BBC, Microsoft (through Multimap), the Guardian (sorry, Gruniad :-)). It's basically a 24 hour hack, with team competing to create the best mashup or web site or piece of code. Around 250 or so developers turned up for the event, which took place at Alexandra Palace, in north London, home of the world's first regular public ‘high definition’ television service, operated by the BBC.
There were a number of sessions from the BBC, Microsoft (including my colleague Paul Foster), etc, in the morning, but come 1pm the fun started, as the teams got down to 24 hours of coding, many sleeping there overnight, or working right through the night.
Everyone seemed to be using Twitter, in addition to the official Backnetwork, so there was quite a buzz going on. Our team had great fun with a blimp, which we attached a camera to, until someone let go of it and it ended up trapped in the roof - oops!
Come 2pm SUnday, the demos began, hosted by Sylvester McCoy (ex Dr Who). There were lots of interesting demos, great ideas, lots of hardware, and lots of crashes :-). There was lots of use of Twitter and Twitter bots for communication, and Fire Eagle for location based searches and services and mapping.
The biggest target for these tended to be the BBC, partially as they were event sponsors, partially because the BBC submitted several teams, but also because the BBC have a whole host of information on their site, and have opened it up for web access. New ways to play back redux video, search for programs and content, etc, were also demoed.
Lonely Planet are just releasing a web API as well, and opened it up early to developers at this event for them to experiment with. Great for location based services to get advice on where to go and what to see when travelling.
